Sound and Fury

Jukka-Pekka Saraste

Jukka-Pekka Saraste has established himself as one of the outstanding conductors of his generation, demonstrating remarkable musical depth and integrity. Born in Heinola, Finland, he began his career as a violinist before training as a conductor with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. An artist of exceptional versatility and breadth and renowned for his objective approach, he feels a special affinity with the sound and style of late Romantic music. He maintains a particularly strong connection to the works of Beethoven, Bruckner, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Sibelius and is internationally celebrated for his interpretations of Mahler.

In April 2022, Saraste was named as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. He will begin his tenure in September 2023. As head of the Artistic Leadership Team of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Saraste emphasises the importance of music for both society and individuals.

”Music is a particularly strong part of Finnish culture, and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra itself plays a significant role in building our identities. As I begin my term as Chief Conductor, I want to engage in the orchestra’s efforts to be the orchestra of all Helsinki residents. The brainstorming between the Artistic Leadership Team and members of the orchestra has been very close. Experiencing music as part of a community is one of the greatest things an orchestra can offer its listeners.”

From 2010 to 2019, he served as Chief Conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne. During his term, the orchestra built a reputation both at home and abroad, touring Austria, Spain, the Baltics, and Asia. The symphonic cycles of Sibelius, Brahms and Beethoven were exceptionally well received. Previously, from 2006 to 2013, Jukka-Pekka Saraste was Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. He was subsequently appointed Conductor Laureate, the very first such title bestowed by the orchestra. Earlier positions include the principal conductorships of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he is now Conductor Laureate, and Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He also served as Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Advisor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. He founded the Finnish Chamber Orchestra, where he remains the Artistic Advisor. Last but not least, Jukka-Pekka Saraste is a founding member of the LEAD! Foundation, a mentorship programme for young conductors and soloists. Based in Finland, the foundation has run projects in Stockholm, Lausanne, Dortmund and Sofia. In 2020, he also created the annual Fiskars Summer Festival, an international platform for both Finnish and international artists to pass on their knowledge and experience to the next generation of conductors from all around the world.

Jukka-Pekka Saraste's guest engagements have led him to the major orchestras worldwide, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Munich Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Dresden, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Staatskapelle Berlin, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Vienna Symphony, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris and the leading Scandinavian orchestras. In North America, he has conducted the Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Houston and Dallas Symphony as well as Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. In recent years, Jukka-Pekka Saraste has developed a strong profile in opera and, following concert performances of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Schönberg’s Erwartung and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, had great success at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna with a new scenic production of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, directed by Calixto Bieito, and Korngold’s Die tote Stadt at the Finnish National Opera. In the 2020-2021 season, he conducted a new staging of Reimann's Lear at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich which was revived in January 2023.

Jukka-Pekka Saraste´s extensive discography includes the complete symphonies of Sibelius and Nielsen with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and several well-received recordings with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra of works by Bartók, Dutilleux, Mussorgsky and Prokofiev for Warner Finlandia. His CDs with WDR Symphony Orchestra for Hänssler have likewise earned him much critical praise. They include Schönberg’s Pelleas and Melisande, Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol, Brahms’ complete Symphonies as well as Mahler’s 5th and 9th Symphony and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8. The complete cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies can be regarded as a legacy of his tenure in Cologne.

Jukka-Pekka Saraste has received the Pro Finlandia Medal, the Sibelius Medal, the Finnish State Prize for Music and, most recently, the insignia of Commander of the Order of the Lion of Finland. He holds honorary doctorates from York University, Toronto and Sibelius Academy, Helsinki.

https://www.jukkapekkasaraste.com/
 

Pekka Kuusisto

Pekka Kuusisto (b. 1976) is one of Finland's most renowned and internationally successful musicians. With the opening of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2023/24 concert season, Kuusisto will begin a three-year term as Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Co-director as a member of the Artistic Leadership Team responsible for planning the programme.

”The planning of this concert season has been a wonderful adventure, and I hope it brings the joy of both discovery and homecoming to our listeners,” Kuusisto says. In the HPO’s concerts, Kuusisto will appear as conductor, violin soloist and lead, meaning he will be conducting the orchestra while playing the violin instead of holding a baton.

Pekka Kuusisto grew up in a musical family and started playing the violin at the age of three. His solo career really kicked off after he won the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in 1995. Since then, his work has taken him at an accelerating pace to all continents throughout the world. His regular workplaces currently include Oslo (Norwegian Chamber Orchestra), Bremen (Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie), Berlin (Mahler Chamber Orchestra) and San Francisco (San Francisco Symphony) – and now also Helsinki.

Pekka Kuusisto is known for his bold and innovative approach, and his repertoire extends from folk music through classical to music that defies genre boundaries. Kuusisto combines, creates new things and moves widely in different art fields, also renewing concert traditions and the interaction between musicians and the audience without detracting from the hard core of tradition, for example as an instrumentalist or – increasingly often – as a conductor.

https://www.harrisonparrott.com/artists/pekka-kuusisto
 

Jean Sibelius: Tapiola, Op. 112

In 1926, Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) was asked by US conductor Walter Damrosch to compose a symphonic poem lasting about 15 minutes on a topic of his choosing. The result was Tapiola, named after the god of the forests in ancient Finnish mythology. Sibelius suspected that non-Finnish listeners might not be familiar with the myth so added a preface to the score: “Wide-spread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests, Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams; Within them dwells the Forest’s mighty god, And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.” The Finnish premiere by the HPO in 1927 was a tremendous success, for it spoke to the very heart of the Finns, though the audience at the premiere in New York in 1926 had been a little baffled. But Damrosch himself wrote to Sibelius: “We were all enthralled by the dark pine forests and the shadowy gods and wood-nymphs who dwell therein. The coda with its icy winds sweeping through the forest made us shiver.”
 

Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 60 in C Major “Il Distratto”

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) was nearly thirty when he entered the service of the mighty Esterházy family. A decade later, his liberal-minded employer gave him permission to receive commissions from outsiders and have them published. By 1774, the court musician was thus fast becoming one of Europe’s most popular and best-known composers when he wrote the music for a five-act comedy (Der Zerstreute) by Jean-François Regnard originally known in French as Le Distrait. The leading character is so absent-minded that he even forgets his own wedding. Haydn’s music was an immediate hit and he was quick to spot its financial potential. To this end, he compiled the music as a six-movement symphony and published it as Il Distratto. This is, however, not a symphony in the conventional sense; there is no organic development of the material and certainly no dramatic span. Rather, it is feel-good music packed with entertaining moments.
 

Anna Clyne: Sound and Fury

Says Anna Clyne of her joint commission from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre National de Lyon and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta premiered in 2019 with Pekka Kuusisto conducting:

“Sound and Fury draws upon two great works of art for inspiration: Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 (Il Distratto) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. To begin, I listened to Il Distratto many times and wrote down the key elements, which ranged from rhythmic gestures to melodic ideas, harmonic progressions and even a musical joke. Sound and Fury is structured in six sub-sections that follow the same trajectory as Il Distratto. In the fifth, a harmonic progression from Il Distratto provides a bed of sound to support the delivery of “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…” – Macbeth’s the last soliloquy on learning of his wife’s death.

“My intention with Sound and Fury is to take the listener on a journey that is both invigorating – with ferocious string gestures that are flung around the orchestra with skittish outbursts – and serene and reflective – with haunting melodies that emerge and recede.”
 

Edgard Varèse: Amériques

Young French Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) knew exactly what sounds he wanted to produce and accordingly experimented with all sorts of sources. In this sense he would have loved today’s technology. Amériques was the first work he composed after moving to the USA in 1915 and hearing that all the scores he had left behind had been destroyed in a fire. The critics at the premiere in 1926 had not a good word to say for it; one went so far as to say it sounded like disaster at the zoo. Scored for large orchestra, Amériques is nevertheless a synthesis of some of the trends at the time; it has throwbacks to Stravinsky’s Rite and Debussy’s Faun, or again to the futurism of Luigi Russolo. It was inspired by the strident New York soundscape: surging crowds, the wind whistling through the narrow alleyways, rush-hour chaos, and the pulsating hush of the urban night. Yet as its title suggests, it also hints at something universal, at the discovery of new worlds, new Americas, maybe within oneself.